


Two Hearths

by Uniasus



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Home, Mental Instability, Post-Canon, Post-HoO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 10:12:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5201975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Uniasus/pseuds/Uniasus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His mind doesn't always remember getting his memories back. He'll wake up not recognizing his cabin, panics when he sees woods and not a Roman city, until things settle in his mind. Remembering the Before and the Giant War. He wants to remember it all, all the time, but it seems beyond him.</p><p>The reason, according to Hestia, is that his memories are linked to home and he has yet to choose one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Hearths

**Author's Note:**

> It's NaNo, I'm working on original stuff (woot! hit 25K tonight) and when I hit my daily word count I trip off into fandom land. Enjoy, I guess.
> 
> Also note, the underline portions are inline author notes. Just roll your mouse over them.

Sometimes, when he wakes up, he doesn't know where he is and panics. He's alone, what happened to all his roommates, and why has the sun risen so high, he's going to be late. Then the room comes into focus and he feels foolish. This is Cabin Three, home. How could he forget?

Sometimes, when walking in the woods, something will look familiar and he groans. He's gone in circles, Lupa's training didn't stick properly, and any moment now the gorgons trailing him will jump out of the trees and insist on giving him samples to taste before dying. And then he knows why things are familiar, he's hidden near here several times before for a game of capture the flag. He's not going around in circles.

Most of the time he knows what's happened. Hera had taken him, put him in a deep sleep for six months, stealing a memory everyday, and then gifted him to the wolves. He was taken in by Camp Jupiter, became its leader, got his memory back, and sailed on the Argo II to fight Gaea. He knows this, knows it happened, every time he sees the Athena Parthenos on the hill or sees Piper walk out of her cabin. It happened, it's over, he's home.

But his memories don't smooth together. There are spikes between sets, between seeing Hera in his cabin and seeing Lupa, between questing with Frank and Hazel and regaining his memories. 

The spike Hera caused is large and jagged, looming higher in his mind then the 600th floor. His mind catches on it, always, and uses it as a starting point. He is alone, he doesn't know where he is, who he is, who Annabeth is, or why things are familiar. He's stuck, Mount Olympus on one side and a smaller peak on the other. It's only after his mind climbs over the second one does he remember everything that happened in the Gaea war. 

He starts and stops, moving to sit next to people at a table before realizing that he actually needs to sit by himself. Waking up early to line up only to see a few other people milling around. Looking for a skyline of Roman buildings, panicking when he only sees cabins and a single large white house before spotting a single tall tree and remembering.

Annabeth helps. Things connect in his mind when she's with him, she is important in each of the three valleys and that helps him flatten the peaks so his memory stretches out behind him. But she can't be there all the time. She has her tasks, he has his, and there are more important things then him needing to pause and figure out what it happening. 

It's a rare thing anyway. It doesn't happen that often.

Just often enough for others to notice, for campers from Camp Half Blood to know to call his name softly when he looks around with wide eyes. For one of the Seven, typically Jason or Piper, to be close by when Annabeth isn't. Frank and Hazel help, sometimes, but they are part of the area between the two spikes in his mind and can't help him piece things together as strongly as the others can.

He talks to Annabeth, to Jason, to Chiron about why his mind won't fix itself. Jason also had his memory wiped and was dropped into a foreign place, but his mind doesn't catch on spikes of interrupted memory. Chiron guesses it's because Jason had been placed in the world shortly after his memory had been wiped. He hadn't had six, no, seven if you count his time in the woods running, months of nothing. It had been a normal feeling, his brain got stuck there, and returns in times of peace.

Annabeth bits her lips and says the brain is a funny thing, they might never know. There's no medical research about this, they don't know if it is permanent, if it will stay like this or maybe fade. 

It's hard, to figure out what's worse. Thinking that he's broken, unfixable, or those nights where he wakes up screaming after a nightmare of Tartarus. They are different horrors, but they are both horrors that weigh on his mind. He stays up at night, not wanting to go to sleep. Sleep can bring him nightmares or it can bring him forgetting and both are horrible. 

Hera doesn't tell him why, doesn't apologize like he wants even though he knows it won't happen. Poseidon doesn't answer his calls either, he probably doesn't know what to say, but sends Tyson to Camp. It doesn't always help. He never slept alone at Camp Jupiter and Tyson's presence across the way can prolong his confusion if he wakes in the middle of a night. 

Annabeth helps more. She takes to sleeping curled into him on his bunk. They keep each other's nightmares away and she grounds him like no other.

Tonight though, she's not at camp. Tyson's not at camp. He doesn't remember why. He doesn't remember many things.

He finds himself outside, not sure how he got there, not sure where he is. Taking deep breathes, he makes his way over to the small, flickering hearth he can see. There is a small girl poking at the flames. She looks up at him and his mind climbs over that second spike, he knows where and who he truly is now.

More importantly, he knows who she is. 

"Hestia."

"Percy Jackson. Hello. Most campers aren't awake this time of night."

He wants to say something about not being most campers, or about it being so late he's sure it's morning and not nighttime, but he gets the feeling that despite her fond smile Hestia has something serious on her mind.

She is often around the campfire, though frequently unnoticed. He doesn't remember seeing her Roman side, Vesta, at Camp Jupiter.

"Can you tell me why you're up tonight?"

"I...was panicking." It's an odd admittance. The man he is now isn't used to panicking, he often doesn't have the time. Something happens, he acts, and when the time to panic comes he doesn't because there is no longer a reason to. The man he sometimes is however, is used to it. The him with a limited memory panicked a lot, about many things, because what bothered and haunted that version of him wasn't a monster to be fought, but himself and that was impossible to escape.

Hestia hums in response.

"I didn't see you at the other Camp."

"No. In both forms, I am hearth, home, and family, and the  Greeks and Romans have defined those terms differently.  For Rome, you have the home in the city you protect, as they currently have New Rome, but your family is those you fight with. The legion. They are at home with each other and that is not a form I will take. Home is their friends, not a symbol of their house.

"Here, for Greece and for this Camp, home is a place. It is safety and peace, the location where your loved ones are, and the hearth is where they gather. And so I spend my time here, at the core of Camp Half Blood's hearth were the campers assemble everyday and the fire responds to their feelings."

She pokes the woodpile again and the flame grows as he watches it. The bonfire is small, contemplative, a mellow yellow compared to the bright orange it had been earlier that night.

"Your problem is you do not know what hearth you want."

"What?"

She smiles as his confusion. "You have lived two lives, here and there, and both of them have been a home to you. Jason has already decided which one he prefers, it's why he is here now, but you have not."

"I'm here, aren't I?"

"Were you? Ten minutes ago?"

No. He hadn't known where he was at all.

"So you're saying that what I need to do is decide which I like better, Camp Half Blood or Camp Jupiter."

It's an impossible questions. He likes them both. 

Camp Half Blood has been both a sanctuary and battle ground, but it has always been a place he belonged to and had friends. He is tied to it in many ways, from his bunk in the cabin to the fleece on the tree to his blood absorbed by its hills. It is where Annabeth grew up, where he found a brother, where he feels safe.

Camp Jupiter doesn't give him that same sense of safety, but it gives him power and a contentedness he associates with long lasting security. It's where he has a present and a future, someplace where time can move forward instead of a focus on the moment and surviving it. It is people, masses of them, who will stand by his side and fight. He never felt alone there.

"Can't a person have two homes?" He doesn't just like the camps, he likes his mom's apartment in the city with her small range and narrow oven. With the fire escape outside his window and moonlit planter. It's comfy and warm and possibly his favorite place in the world. In the past, he's also called his dorm at Yancy's home too. It's his place, just for him, in an institution surround by others. It's peaceful with it's small floor space and thick walls.

"It's possible," Hestia agrees. "It happens when there is a transition in life. Where you have to live in multiple places because of your situation. But eventually that settles, and while you might call two places home there will always be the one you prefer to be."

He frowns. "You're gonna tell me that's not for me, aren't you?"

She sighs and her face turns sad. "I wish it could be for you, Percy. You have done much for the gods, more than perhaps we can repay, and for many of the other campers belonging to two hearths is not a problem."

It's on the tip of his tongue again, he's not like the other campers. But this time he's not being cheeky. It's a sad truth.

He hates it, often. It makes it hard to connect. Annabeth understands Tartarus, but doesn't quite understand his fascination with New Rome. Jason understands both camps, but his mind doesn't skip and he hasn't seen the same horrors. Sometimes he wishes he could talk to Nico, but the Hades child is rarely at camp and even then the air is awkward between them. 

"Choosing a hearth, choosing a camp, will settle my mind?" he asks to confirm. Hestia nods.

Thought there is already something that does that, someone, though she's not always there. 

Annabeth. Annabeth. She's got her own life, she can't always be at his side, but she is what keeps him together. 

It's the Roman version of the hearth, finding it in a community instead of in a place, and that feels wrong because she's from the Greek side of the family and that means here on Long Island. But if that's what settles him, people and not places, there is nothing he can say to that.

"Is it, is it possible to have a hearth you don't return to?"

They have talked of New Rome, they have, and Annabeth wants to see it, but he doesn't believe she sees the long term of potential. She sees something quaint and interesting, something for Rome but not for Greece because they have always been a society of the individual. Small person quests, individual heroes. If anything, New Rome is just an idea for New Athens.

"Anything is possible. Odysseus stayed away from his hearth for many years, just as men do now. But I do not think you will never return to yours. It will draw you and when have you ever not gone somewhere you wanted to go?"

He smiles at the memories of sneaking on quests and forcing the doorman at the Empire State Building to let him by.

The idea is still wrong, choosing Camp Jupiter over Camp Half Blood. He knows it's the future, knows it a balance to Jason staying in New York. But his _identity_ is Greek, tied in with Poseidon and his place in the Parthenon. That is gone in California.

So he asks, voice small and uncertain because the idea is strange and might offed the goddess next to him. "Can my home be a person instead of a place?"

Hestia smiles, warm and proud. "It's a not a hearth I can appear in, but it is within my domain. Heart hearths are my favorite, they can move, and that means you can be home anywhere in the world."

She says anywhere, but they both know that the place is not the important part. Even as Hestia, location simply serves as a anchor for the deeper feelings of being wanted and loved.

And there has been no one, no one, who anchors him as much as Annabeth does.

He smiles at Hestia and her grin widens. "Declaring a hearth won't fix everything, what Hera did is too extreme and you were disconnected from here, from her, for too long. But it will help."

While he's had Athena butt into his love life, and Aphrodite outright manipulate, he never expected an Olympian who had no stake in his relationship to push him to propose. It's an odd idea, coming from Hestia who he barely knows and thinks about, but at the same time he can't see himself taking such advice from another Olympian without bulking.

She is trying to help and when he thinks about the pitiful fire she tended all alone before Kronos came calling, he suspects she can relate to him on multiple levels. She has seen her own home shrink and go bad, has felt the pull of two different hearths. 

"Thank you. For talking to me," he says and means it with all his heart. The flames react to him and he knows Hestia understands just how much this conversation has touched him, helped him, and will continue to be a grounding memory.

"You helped me repair my own hearth. I wanted to return the favor."

She disappears when he looks towards the sun he now sees rising, feeling more refreshed then he should feel after getting so little sleep. He wants to run to cabin nine and get them to make him a ring of celestial bronze. Something to symbolize the camp, because that is Annabeth's home and he wants to show how she is now his. A Greek column design, perhaps. Or a tall pine with it's tip and roots touching. He has never been good at this type of thing.

He's not going to go on one knee, not yet. He wants to, can't see himself with anyone else, but knows this is not the time. They are teenagers, they are still discovering who they are, and once they know that and feel ready he will give her a proper engagement ring.

For now, it'll just be a promise. He would follow her anywhere, because no place is home without her.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the inspiration for this comes from the fact that while we see Jason struggle with his experiences/loyalty to both camps, we don't see Percy's although he has an almost mirrored plot. Even more so - Percy is elected to lead Camp Jupiter, is he responsible for and to them. No matter how you look at the effects of HOO on his preatorship, that is a huge connection to Camp Jupiter I felt Riordan was remiss in not bringing up again. 
> 
> Which just means I had to ^_^


End file.
